Emoticon interoperability can be a nightmare. Or hilarious. Whichever!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2012/05/24 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2012/05/24/10309869.aspx

Claudia and I are using two different kinds of smartphones.

I use the HTC Arrive, which is running Windows Phone 7.5.

She uses the HTC Rhyme, which is running Android.

I'm Sprint and she's Verizon, but the carrier differences are minor.

The real difference I notice is in the emoticons!

Becaise those primitive days of

;-)

and

:-p

are behind us now.

And even cursory glance at Android versus WP emoticons should make this clear:

It is clear that semantic content is very different.

And we always have to be aware of the differences between (just to give one example)

and

if we want to avoid misunderstandings, to say the least!

In a very real way, the two platforms have severe interoperability issues without us taking the time to understand the pragmatic (in the linguistic sense) differences between them when interpreting the meanings between the two.

I'm just thankful neither of us has an iPhone, and that I'm no longer using the Palm Pre (which has been relegated to backup phone status!).

And what to do once we get into the Emoji?

That will be a topic for another day!

cheong00 on 24 May 2012 7:31 PM:

You're right that the Android people making icons didn't get it. We use :O for surprise (or more accurately "astonished") like 10+ years from now. Making it "angry" doesn't sounds right.

And for "cry", we used to make it :~~~~~~~~~~~ (with Fixedsys font it should look right) The more sad it is, the more '~' is appended. Make it multi-line on 80 column screen if you really mean "cry like flooding". :P

Programmerman on 25 May 2012 4:35 AM:

The Windows Phone list derives from the MSN/Windows Live Messenger emoticon list, especially now that in WP7.5, the SMS/MMS Messaging app is also a Windows Live Messenger client. But, yeah, it'll be fun when everyone does emoji. At least we can see most of them on our Windows Phones.